


Notes from Delphi

by salticidae



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Electrocution, Gore, Paralysis, Torture, robot gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 22:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2405717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salticidae/pseuds/salticidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The DJD finally catches Ambulon at a good time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes from Delphi

**Author's Note:**

> Conveniently written for day 4 of the Goretober challenge: torture.
> 
> also I..... really wanted a fic where the DJD went to town on someone and realized in rereading that Pharma's deal as it's described to us is just vague enough for me to be an awful, awful person to Ambulon. So. Have some extremely self-indulgent robogore! SORRY AMBULON

Ambulon is becoming careless.  Well, relatively speaking: through Vos’ sight, Tarn can see the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his helm jerks at every sound.  He still rarely ventures outside Delphi’s walls, and never alone, but today his only accompaniment is a couple of the local miners—directing maintenance on some remote part of the facility, Tarn thinks.  It doesn’t particularly matter.  The absence of any other medical staff is more satisfying, for reasons that have less to do with unwillingness to harm them and much more with precisely how grating Pharma can be when he thinks he has the right to object.  It never gains him any ground, but he does it frequently, and if their proximity to his facility is the only complaint he can raise during their next exchange, so much the better.  He knows that Ambulon’s position as his staff does not exempt him from The List.   

Besides, Tarn doubts that Pharma will object to a few transformation cogs towards the quota gained with so little effort on his part.

Vos’ plating rustles under his hands, urging him to get on with it, and the small mech pings Tarn with the environmental conditions. The wind is letting up, for the moment; they should act soon. Tarn sends Kaon, waiting on the Peaceful Tyranny, his first cue, then assimilates Vos' data into his firing algorithms and lines up the first shot.

Below them, Ambulon nearly jumps out of his plating as the miner on his far side collapses, and Vos shivers when his optics come into view, wide and pale in fear. In the time it takes for the other miner to discover their communications have been disabled, Vos has reloaded, and the mech’s confusion allows Tarn to drop him without trouble. Ambulon seems rooted to the spot, shaking minutely; his optics have gone unfocused staring at the body lying beside him.  “No fun,” Vos hisses, not bothering with Neocybex.  Tarn _tsk_ s at him.

“We’re getting to that,” he says, and replaces Vos’ standard magazine with one loaded with tranquilizing rounds.  Almost immediately, Vos bristles angrily, muttering objections and invective until Tarn closes a hand over his receiver—and, incidentally, his spark chamber.  “We are not doing this here.  The doctor would interfere, and I do so _hate_ breaking my word.   _Patience_.”  Silence; then Vos spits one last curse, for dignity’s sake, and subsides.  Tarn lines up the shot.

* * *

 

In the time it takes for Ambulon to regain consciousness (far, far away from Delphi’s borders), Vos has already set to digging around in his circuitry with predatory glee.  Kaon stands just behind him and watches with interest.  He’s opened Ambulon’s armor in several places, careful not to draw energon yet, methodically severing wires and picking at the motor assemblies along his limbs.  Ambulon jerks awake at the exact moment Vos is maneuvering a claw carefully through a bundle of wires; disturbed, he misses the one he was aiming for and slices through several others.  The arm convulses reflexively, and Tarn can see the mounting horror in Ambulon’s optics as his processor begins to parse his situation.  It’s incredibly satisfying.

Tarn leans down by Ambulon’s helm and says, “well.” That’s when the shaking starts up in earnest.  He trembles like he might if his frame contained a proper engine for a proper alt mode, going at full throttle. His plating quietly rattles against itself, but otherwise the mech lies still and unresisting, which is just as well for him.  Vos’ tinkering has rendered his limbs quite unreliable, though not completely useless; indeed, Vos looks disappointed that he hasn’t tried to use them yet.  Tarn continues speaking: “It’s so good of you to join us, Ambulon.”  He puts a hand on Ambulon’s thoracic armor, and scrapes gently at the paint with the side of his thumb.  “We’ve all been dying to see you.”  Several paces away, in the shadow of the Peaceful Tyranny, Helex makes a show of rolling his optics.

Whatever Helex’s opinion of Tarn’s chatter, though, it doesn’t stop Ambulon from shuddering all the harder, even pinned firmly under a broad, dark hand.  Tarn vents deep and slowly adjusts his hand for better purchase against Ambulon’s armor.  Vos has been up and about since Ambulon woke, flitting around the edges of Ambulon’s vision, clearly enjoying the show.  Now he springs into Ambulon’s personal space without warning, hissing sharply, and though he stops short of physical contact, instinct has already brought Ambulon’s limbs up in a jerky attempt to scuttle backwards.  Futility aside, this is exactly the reaction Vos is looking for—Ambulon cries out suddenly as the inside joint of his left arm superheats, glowing dangerously orange through his cheap, rapidly bubbling paint.  Every pore in the metal of his arm is white hot, and before Ambulon can help it his optics have gone bright in panic; Vos laughs high and breathy somewhere out of sight.  Smoke and water vapor begin to rise off of his plating, and as he attempts to bring his arm, half-molten, back to lie flat next to him, it pulls apart slowly, leaving thick trails of stretched metal in the air.  Whole sections of his plating separate, leaving the mechanisms of his arm exposed and sparking as the heated metal seeps into it.  

A shadow falls across Ambulon’s torso, and his optics dart upwards reflexively: Helex looms over Tarn’s shoulders, and from this close Ambulon can hear the awful humming of his smelter as it begins to heat up.  Tarn turns to address him, hand still splayed across Ambulon’s thorax; they pitch their voices too low for Ambulon to hear.  He deactivates his optics and tries to keep still.

“Helex,” Tarn says suddenly, addressing Ambulon, “has volunteered to go first.  I don’t think I have to tell you that struggling would be inadvisable.”  He doesn’t wait for any sort of acknowledgement before motioning for Helex to begin, and neither does his hand leave Ambulon’s plating before Helex’s secondary arms have gripped Ambulon firmly about the abdomen and begun to lift him up.  Ambulon’s optics snap on and panic sets in; he scrabbles ineffectually at Helex’s hands with his good one, legs kicking blindly at the air.  One of his feet connects with the bottom of Helex’s smelter, and the ringing stops him cold as surely as Tarn’s voice would have.  Helex just laughs at him.  “Thought so.”

His torso unseals, hot air blazing across Ambulon’s face, and he carefully maneuvers Ambulon inside.  Ambulon manages to turn and grasp weakly at the rim of the smelter with the last of his strength, but Helex dislodges his hand simply by shutting himself up again.  The heat inside is already overwhelming, sharp and dry, and Ambulon’s fans kick on in what has to be the most futile attempt at self-preservation ever made.  He reaches hesitantly into his systems for his pain sensors and finds, as he suspected, that Vos has locked them into active status.  As the temperature climbs, his systems spit out increasingly-corrupted error messages; the vision in one optic flickers dangerously, and his already damaged arm freezes up entirely.  Ambulon can feel his armor flatten where it’s pressed up against the smelter’s walls, soft and malleable in the heat.  His cheap topcoat has already been burnt to ash, little flames licking across his body as it went, and now even his original chromatophores are failing in batches.  Underneath, most of his plating is already the bright red-orange of half-molten metal, and spots of white heat begin to flare visibly in places, blooming along his limbs and across his face.  The glass in both optics shatters abruptly.  His armor curls up at the corners, aflame, and when he can feel it sagging under its own weight, threatening to drag delicate internal sensors along with it, Ambulon opens his mouth to sob raggedly into the heat.  What comes out is half buzzing static; his vocalizer has fared little better than the rest of his body.  

The humming around him stops suddenly, and Ambulon realizes distantly that Helex must be done.  The heat lingers, of course, dissipating too slowly for true relief, and in the time it takes for Helex to actually get around to opening himself back up again, one of Ambulon’s optics has stopped working entirely.  The shock of cold Messatine air against his raw plating is almost as painful as the smelter’s heat: when Helex drops him into the snow he fizzes and pings violently.  Several of his plates cool misshapenly, pressed against the ground or indented where Helex handled him, leaving two more of his limbs and a large portion of his thorax immobile.  

Ambulon lies there for a few moments, vents cracked and stalling.  His vocalizer whines involuntarily, a soft, pleading noise that makes Helex snort and kick at his side.  Tesarus appears next to Helex, clearly amused, and elbows him meaningfully.  “Sweet.”  Then, to Vos: “Can you fix his voice any?  He needs to be able to scream.”  Vos mutters something resentful in Primal Vernacular, then makes a spitting noise, but he kneels down by Ambulon’s helm anyway and puts his fingers on either side of Ambulon’s throat far, far too gently.  The scalpel that folds out of his index finger is less gentle, cutting the metal of Ambulon’s cervical plating the way he might open a corpse.  Much of the damage already done to Ambulon’s vocalizer is irreversible without replacement parts on hand, but Vos manages to restore it to the point of mostly-intelligible speech; a steady stream of trembling pleas immediately resolves out of the static.  Vos and Tesarus both look absolutely delighted.  

When Tesarus finally reaches for him, all Ambulon can do is curl one leg in defensively and continue his litany of _no_ s and _please_ s, futile as he knows it is.  The dull ache under his deformed plating sharpens in anticipation, and he shuts his working optic off even before Tesarus has lifted him off the ground.  “Come on, come on,” Tesarus says, switching his blades on.  Ambulon only gets a few seconds’ preparation before he’s shoved unceremoniously into the path of Tesarus’ grinder.  This time he does scream, high and buzzing around the edges, as his already-damaged legs are eaten away, blurring into a cacophony of wires, struts, and energon.  When everything below his knees has been shredded, Tesarus maneuvers Ambulon against the blades, holding him at different angles—barely nicking the front of his thighs, enough to gouge away plating but not tear at the internal circuitry; his left side pressed firmly against the blades to rend holes in his major fuel lines and processing tanks, leaving most of Tesarus’ legs and all the snow beneath coated in vibrant magenta; what’s left of his legs shaped by the grinder as surely as a dowel whittled, if less precise.

Ambulon’s legs are nearly gone when Tarn steps forward and levels a stern look at Tesarus.  “You know very well he’s got to be able to sit when you’re done with him,” he says.  The big mech rumbles irritably, but holds Ambulon away from his blades.  There’s no arguing with Tarn.

Complaining is fair game, though: “How am I supposed to have any fun with them when you guys are always interrupting?  I hardly even get to do anything—Helex had him for at least twice as long.”  Helex laughs at that, having retreated near the Peaceful Tyranny to watch, and Tesarus gestures rudely with the arms not occupied with Ambulon.  Tarn’s look has not subsided, however; Tesarus finally relents, tossing Ambulon aside and stalking off to have a shoving match with Helex.  

Kaon steps forward.  He comes close enough for Ambulon to feel the heat coming off of his systems, and leans down to take Ambulon’s face in his hands, mapping it roughly with his fingers.  One hand comes away to strike just under Ambulon’s optics.  “Turn your eyes back on,” Kaon says, almost cheerfully.  Ambulon struggles to bring the working one online, but the other is permanently unresponsive.  Kaon hits him again anyway, then straightens up and steps a few paces back for transformation clearance.  

Alt mode assumed, Tarn lifts Ambulon up roughly by the junction of his neck and shoulder and deposits him into Kaon’s restraints.  His hand lingers briefly.  “These colors suit you much better,” he says, voice dangerously low.  Ambulon can feel his spark clench, and his vents pick up again, panicking, but Tarn only backs off, amused.  The cue given, Kaon’s mounted coils begin to hum with charge; Ambulon would struggle if any of his remaining limbs were functional.  As it is, he vents erratically into the cold air, trying and failing to steel himself for this.

The first few jolts are minute, testing passes that leave him buzzing in the areas of his frame which still have sensation. They might even have been pleasant in another context, but terror runs too cold in Ambulon's lines for that; such a relatively mild start only adds fuel to the darkest parts of his imagination.  He doesn’t try to shut his remaining optic feed off again, not when he knows Tarn is watching, and settles for staring into the distance, his good lens going wide and unfocused.  The blur of dark purple that is the leader of the DJD shifts almost imperceptibly on the edge of his vision—not three seconds later an agonizing shock rips through his systems, voltage dialed up almost to fatal levels.  Several of Ambulon’s current limiters blow immediately, the circuits around them burning out in a cascade of heat.  Two more strikes follow, slightly less intense but closer together, and Ambulon shrieks static, vocalizer too far gone for screaming.  A thought resolves out of his battered processor: he won’t last much longer.  His optical feed has gone jagged around the edges; all his remaining limbs have long since locked up, the mechanisms inside smoking; he’s leaking energon in countless places, not least of all his fuel tank, torn and stinging in the open air.  Kaon rustles his plating and laughs when that makes Ambulon flinch, then delivers another massive, spark-wrenching shock.

“Oh, Ambulon,” Tarn says, and behind his voice Ambulon can hear the strains of an old orchestral piece, one he’s almost certain he should recognize.  “Deserting was bad enough—Shockwave lost valuable data when you disappeared, you know—but I never would have thought it in you to twist the knife like this.”  He gestures to Kaon, who releases Ambulon and transforms, stepping back to join the rest of the Justice Division.  Ambulon lies wheezing in the snow and tries not to look at Tarn.  “Enlisting with the Autobots, fighting for them, _fixing_ them—!”  He shakes his head, affecting severe disappointment.  “And they _let_ you.  They let a Decepticon traitor into their medibays and never thought any better of it.  But this isn’t about them, Ambulon.  This is about you.”  Tarn kneels down by Ambulon’s helm, close enough to brush his fingers over ruined thoracic plating.  His next words are pitched down enough to set Ambulon’s spark convulsing: “This is about how you betrayed us, Ambulon.  All of us.”  Fuel and oil rise in the remains of Ambulon’s intake, and he gives a quiet, hiccuping sob.  

“I— I didn’t—”

Tarn shushes him.  His voice has gone lower still.  “And now you’re going to redeem yourself.”  He stands up, takes a few paces back, and watches.  Ambulon’s spark reels, flaring past the damaged lining of his spark chamber, then finally, agonizingly gives out.  The resulting explosion is hardly impressive, given his frame size, but it scatters his remains well enough.  

They don’t stand around long, after that: Kaon is the first one back aboard the Peaceful Tyranny, and Vos, Helex, and Tesarus follow shortly after, Tesarus kicking at armor fragments as he goes.  Tarn brings up the rear: he closes the loading ramp and gives the order to take off, and never once looks back on the little smear of magenta against snow. 


End file.
